John Venn, Inventor Of The Venn Diagram, Gets Google Logo On His 180th Birthday

Today’s Google logo is a hat-tip to British logician and philosopher, and inventor of the Venn diagram, John Venn on his 180th birthday.

Born on this date in 1834, Venn came up with the idea of using circles to sort groups to illustrate their relationship to each other sometime around 1880

Offering users two circles, each with its own group of categories, the interactive logo delivers an answer combining category pairings via a Venn-diagram. For example, choosing “Sea Life” from the first group of categories, and “Has a Shell” from the second, gives you a sea turtle as shown in the following video:

Once the Venn diagram result is displayed, users can then go to “John Venn” search results, replay to choose new categories, or share their Venn-diagram result via Facebook, Twitter or Google+.

The doodle’s lead project designer Mike Dutton claimed the style used for the logo was originally based on old math and science text books, but then changed up to include a more fresh, vibrant look that could be easily animated.

Pairing the “Sea Life” with “Mythical” categories, Dutton said his favorite Venn Diagram result that he worked on was the Kraken, “I loved the idea of taking something that is utterly terrifying, such as a large sea creature that devours entire ships, and turning it into just a little dude having a bit of fun, albeit still at the expense of the ship and its crew.”

Dutton shared the following sketch to show how the logo first came to be: